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Just before Memorial Day, Shawn Eric Hall was preparing to have a cookout at his Hagerstown, Md., home. He had looked up recipes for homemade ice cream and told his neighbors, his family said.
Then, the Sunday night before, the 59-year-old drove off in his red Ford Fusion and vanished. He left behind his cane corso, Xena, and didn’t show up for work in the following days.
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“He would have never left Xena without telling somebody,” his younger sister Michelle Runnion said.
Hall’s disappearance in late May launched an extensive search, with his family combing through his laptop, phone records and credit card statements for signs of his whereabouts as police simultaneously conducted their investigation. Weeks went by and clues slowly emerged: An address found in Hall’s search history. Parking tickets racked up for a car tied to Hall. And thousands of dollars spent at businesses crossing multiple counties in Maryland after he was last seen.
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Nearly three months after he was first reported missing in Hagerstown, Prince George’s County police found his remains almost 100 miles away in Upper Marlboro.
Police and family say the trail of clues lead to Boisey Neal, a 57-year-old man from Glen Burnie, Md., who started a business with Hall after the two men had met in prison, where Hall was a chaplain and Neal was incarcerated. Though a motive remains under investigation, police said, authorities charged Neal with first-degree murder. Police say Neal met Hall at a parking lot in Upper Marlboro the day he went missing and later admitted to his girlfriend to killing Hall, saying “I had no choice … I am a very bad man.”
Neal is being held without bond at the Prince George’s County Department of Corrections. According to online court records, Neal is being represented by the Prince George’s County public defender’s office, which declined to comment for the story.
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While Hall’s family never lost hope when he was missing, the search for the beloved father and friend coming to an end was worse than they could have imagined.
“I thought I would feel better, I would feel more at peace but actually I have felt worse,” Sherry Maston, Hall’s older sister, said of the August arrest in her brother’s killing. “During the process, we were so busy trying to find, grasping at everything … trying to find Shawn, that was our main goal.”
‘Did not know a stranger’
Born and raised in West Virginia, Hall was the only brother of two sisters. A lover of both college and professional football, Hall often attended West Virginia Mountaineers and Baltimore Ravens games with his 26-year-old son, said Runnion, 55.
“He was a very outgoing person, did not know a stranger,” Runnion said.
Last Christmas, Hall dressed up as Santa Claus for his nieces and nephews at the family Christmas party. The kids loved it so much, it was going to become the family tradition, Runnion said.
Before his most recent job at Tractor Supply in Hagerstown, Hall spent years pastoring his own church in Parkersburg, W.Va., according to his family. His Christian faith was paramount to him, and when he moved to Maryland, Hall became a prison chaplain in Hagerstown.
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Hall resigned from his role at the facility, the Maryland Correctional Training Center, in 2021, according to the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.
While there, Hall also met Neal, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for crimes in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County, including robbery and weapons offenses. According to charging documents, Neal would “look after” Hall “like his protector.” When Neal was released from prison, the two became business partners and planned to start a vehicle transporting business, according to the charging documents.
Hall’s family knew little about Neal but did know Hall was looking forward to starting a new business.
“That’s the thing about Shawn, he would see the good in everybody and he believed in second chances,” Runnion said. “Some people just don’t deserve a second chance.”
Finding Shawn
According to charging documents, neighbors said they saw Hall cutting his grass on the afternoon of May 28, the Sunday before Memorial Day. Later that night, a neighbor reported seeing Hall “leaving in a hurry in his red Ford Fusion.”
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By May 31, Hall’s son reported to his aunt that Hall wasn’t in contact with the young men he began mentoring after meeting on a 2012 mission trip in Africa, whom he spoke with sometimes twice a day. On June 1, Hall was reported missing through Hagerstown police, according to charging documents. An officer who responded to Hall’s home said they found an open garage door without his car and his driver’s license inside a closet.
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“We knew the minute that Shawn wasn’t home and he wasn’t answering his phone,” Maston, 63, said. “We just knew that it wasn’t like our brother.”
As police put out a missing person flier, the family traveled to Hagerstown to search for information about Hall’s whereabouts. They picked up Hall’s dog and collected valuables from his home, including his computer.
Hagerstown police obtained Hall’s call records, according to charging documents, and through mapping software discovered that Hall had traveled to Upper Marlboro the night he was seen driving away from home. The last ping from his cellphone was at 4:35 a.m., west of the 13300 block of Old Marlboro Pike, the documents said.
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With the help of Prince George’s County police, detectives found his car near Southern Avenue in Suitland. The “entire floor carpet was removed from the trunk” and an 8-inch “large butcher knife” was found on the trunk’s frame, according to the charging documents.
Back in West Virginia, with her brother’s laptop at home, Maston began to notice bank card charges from Hall’s credit card roll in. According to charging documents, the charges spanned several businesses in Prince George’s County, Anne Arundel County, Baltimore County and Washington D.C.
“It was one of those ‘make yourself sick at your stomach’ moments,” Maston said. “When I started looking at the current charges, they were all after he had went missing. There was almost $3,000 in charges.”
Maston also contacted Hall’s cellphone provider and found that Hall had gotten a call from Neal’s phone number the night police said he left for Upper Marlboro. As she dug into Hall’s laptop more, she discovered he had also searched for directions to 13308 Old Marlboro Pike, which police confirmed was the address located between the two cell towers where Hall’s phone last pinged, according to charging documents.
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During the investigation, police learned from family that Hall had purchased and registered an $80,000 white Dodge Ram, with monthly payments running $1,800, for the business, charging documents said. The truck was mostly used by Neal and the payments were more than Hall could afford at the time, the documents said.
Maston said parking tickets began arriving in the mail for the truck, and discovered that in the weeks since Hall’s disappearance, it had been repossessed for missed payments. The parking tickets showed a location not far from where Hall’s car was found, according to authorities.
Maston continued to pray with family and friends as far as Germany, hoping her brother would be found alive.
Police eventually tracked the truck to a Glen Burnie address connected to Neal in July, according to charging documents, and found three receipts from the same bank card used at a liquor store after Hall disappeared. Police obtained store surveillance video that showed a man and a woman using the card. The man on the footage matched images of Neal provided by Hall’s family, charging documents said.
Detectives found Neal and his girlfriend at a motel in Glen Burnie on Aug. 23 and executed a search warrant, charging documents said. Neal told police that the last time he saw Hall was a week before his disappearance and that Hall gave him his bank card in April. He denied “being familiar with Old Marlboro Pike,” the documents said.
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After changing his story during his interview with investigators “multiple times,” Neal admitted to meeting Hall in the parking lot at Old Marlboro Pike early on May 29, where “they had been drinking in Hall’s Ford Fusion,” police said in charging documents.
The documents don’t detail how exactly investigators think Hall was killed, but indicate a white Dodge Ram appeared in the area shortly after Hall arrived. Investigators also say Neal called someone to help him dispose of Hall’s body and car. Police said no one else has been charged in Hall’s killing at this time. An autopsy to determine his cause of death is pending.
“He tried to tell on me before I caught him,” Neal texted his girlfriend on May 29, according to charging documents. “I had no choice.”
Maston said she got a call from detectives around 3 p.m. on Aug. 23 letting her know they had arrested the man who is accused of killing her brother. But she had not yet received any information about her brother’s whereabouts.
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“I was thankful that they had arrested him and they had enough to hold him, but still my main goal was to find my brother,” Maston said. “And I knew, at this point, it wasn’t going to be a body, it was going to be his remains.”
The detective called her back at about 8 p.m. that evening.
“He asked me if I had prayed that night and day, and I said, ‘Well, I had a whole lot of people praying’ … because that’s all we had left to do. Only God was going to solve this,” Maston said.
Hall’s skeletal remains, with what appeared to be duct tape attached, were found near a fence bordering the Old Marlboro Pike property where he had last met with Neal, according to charging documents.
“He said, ‘Well, your prayers were answered. We found your brother,’” Maston said.
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